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There is a fundamental problem that Internet startups face when they begin to grow: scalability. It is imperative to be able to not only handle large flows of data from usage, but also to deploy changes and upgrades to your software across multiple servers as fast as possible.

Twitter faces this challenge every day as its farm of servers grows, and today the San Francisco-based company is open sourcing its solution to the deployment problem for all to use. Sponsor Named “Murder” after the collective noun used to describe a group of crows (I guess “Gaggle,” “Flock” or any other bird plural didn’t sound as nice), this part-Python, part-Ruby tool allows lighting fast code deployments across large groups of servers. Twitter engineer Larry Gadea says it took what once was a 40 minute deploy and shortened it just 12 seconds – an impressive feat, no doubt.